Teaching

I believe that lively teaching requires lively research, and that both need to be tied closely to complex problems that arise in everyday life. In order to maximize the interplay between these activities, I dedicate time in the classroom to teaching students how they think about the world as researchers. To do this, I stage classroom experiences that enable us to engage with the materials at hand, while also modeling ways of understanding our relationship to those materials not simply as passive consumers of pre-packaged information, but as creators of new knowledge for ourselves, for our fellow students, and for the various worlds that we inhabit in other aspects of our lives. All of my classes ask and enable students to engage actively and critically with course materials in a variety of interdisciplinary contexts.

In addition to teaching in IAS and at UW Bothell, I am adjunct faculty in the English Department at UW Seattle where I teach occasional graduate courses and supervise doctoral work. I also work with UW graduate students through two ongoing projects designed to promote interdisciplinarity and community-engaged research and teaching: IAS’s Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy and the Simpson Center for the Humanities’ graduateCertificate in Public Scholarship, which I co-direct.

Research/Scholarship

My research interests fall into several broad categories: American studies, cultural studies, queer studies, critical race studies, and interdisciplinary and public scholarship. My first book, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton UP), focused on the intersection of these fields in the specific context of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States. In 2007, I co-edited (with Glenn Hendler) Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press) and co-developed an interactive website that extends its inquiries: Keywords for American Cultural Studies. An update of this book is in progress. My current scholarship expands on this research in various ways. I am working on two books: Sex, Panic, Nation (University of Chicago Press) and New Formations of Cultural Studies: Collaboration, Practice, Research.

At the UW, I have co-directed or developed a number of collaborations and lecture series: “Thinking Sex in Transnational Times” in 2002-2003 (with Chandan Reddy); “Placing the Humanities: New Locations, New Meanings” in 2004-2005 and the “Cultural Studies Praxis Collective” in 2005-2008 (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren); the Simpson Center for the Humanities’ week-long “Institute in the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students in 2005-2009 and “Platforms for Public Scholarship” in 2009-2010 (with Miriam Bartha); and the “Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy” beginning in 2004 (with Martha Groom and David Goldstein) beginning in 2004. I also serve on the Press Committee of the University of Washington Press. I currently co-direct the UW graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship.